The management of IT infrastructures, especially large IT infrastructures having many hundreds or thousands of items of IT equipment, is a particularly complex task. Often, computer hardware in the IT infrastructure has a shelf-life longer than that of the operating systems and software applications that run on the computer hardware. Accordingly, as operating systems and software applications are added, replaced, or are upgraded, at some point in time computer hardware in the IT infrastructure may be deemed to no longer be suitable. However, determining which items of IT equipment to replace and when they should be replaced is a non-trivial exercise for an IT manager.